The Private Wound (20 page)

“But I wasn't there after Concannon left, in the afternoon. I'd not lit the lamp. The turf fire was out.”

“Be easy, Dominic. Keefe'll sort it when he has the fire put out. Go to bed now. You're dropping.”

And believe it or not, damp sheets and excitement and all, I must have gone to sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

I was awoken at 9.30 by the telephone bell ringing down
stairs. Presently Flurry appeared. “Concannon wants a word with you.” I crawled down to the instrument, my head splitting. The superintendent's first words did not clear up my sense of total disorientation.

“Good morning, Mr. Eyre. So you thought better of it.”

“
Thought better?
What on earth are you talking about?”

There was a brief silence. “You'll be at Lissawn House at two o'clock? I'm busy this morning.”

“I could hardly be anywhere else, now someone has burnt down my cottage.”

“I'll be over there. You and Mr. Leeson had better not lose sight of each other till I come.”

“And what's the meaning of that sinister remark?” I asked sourly, but Concannon had already rung off.

Flurry was frying eggs and bacon in the kitchen.

“What on earth's Concannon raving about?”

“He asked when I'd seen you last, and I told him you were asleep upstairs, worn out with booze and excitement.” Flurry was in great shape. “It seemed to knock him all of a heap. And what did he tell you?”

“To keep an eye on
you
—he's turning up after lunch.”

“Are you insured, Dominic?”

“Do you mean my possessions or my life?”

This caused him to laugh uproariously. He was certainly his old self again. “You're a great joker,” he wheezed, in between fits of coughing. “I wouldn't want you to lose the one nor the other.”

“I didn't have much in the cottage. A few books and clothes. Oh, and my binoculars. It's a nuisance about the typewriter: but I rescued my MSS.”

“That's what you care about most,” he ventured, almost shyly.

“I suppose so. But I'm beginning to think it's a worthless novel.”

“Ah well, you've your life before you. C'mon now and
eat up. If you can keep the first mouthful down, you're all right.”

He gave me a cup of coffee laced with whiskey. “This'll restore you. A hair of the dog, as the saying is.” He looked out of the window. “We'll have a cloud-burst before the day's end. So we can fish the river to-morrow, please God.”

After breakfast I went out for a stroll in the demesne. I felt better, but my head still throbbed and the air was thunderous. A weight of indigo cloud was building up over the mountains inland. My feet took me, as if magnetised, to that green spot by the Lissawn. So dark was the day that I could imagine Harriet ghosting towards me through the trees in her white night-dress.

The water was low and sullen. Rocks stood up out of it like tombstones. Flurry had told me that, the day after Harriet's death, police in waders were searching that stretch of the Lissawn. In those days there were no skin-divers or metal-detectors—not in the West of Ireland, anyway. And the pool where he so often cast his fly was pretty deep. So, if the knife was there, it had not been discovered.

I heard a car coming slowly up the avenue, and soon recognised it through the trees. I ran to cut it off, arriving neatly as Kevin climbed out. He turned round, and there I was. If I had hoped he might, in the shock, betray himself, it was a failure. He did not grow pale or start back.

“How
are
you?” he said, gripping my hand warmly.

“None the worse for being alive.”

“That's a terrible thing to have happened. It's the mercy of providence you weren't sleeping there last night.”

“Oh, you've heard about the fire.”

“Keefe told me—the fire brigade chief. Then I drove past on my way here. The place is gutted. Only the walls standing.”

“Has Keefe found out how it started?”

“He's investigating. Of course he'll have to call in the
insurance company's fire assessors. But it's you I'm worried about: I'm afraid you must have lost everything. Anything I can lend you, just call on me—you'll be wanting a replacement for your typewriter.”

“That's very kind of you.”

By this time we were in the house. Flurry was in his fishing room, tying flies. “Hallo, Kevin,” he said, not looking up, “so you're burning down your own houses now. You might have warned us.”

“I don't like that class of joke at all. Don't you realise Dominic might have—”

“Been fried to a crisp? Yes, I see your point: as the actress said to the bishop.”

“This is no time to be making foul jokes, Flurry. I—”

“Well, what did you come here for?”

“To inquire after Dominic, of course. He's had a dreadful ordeal.”

“That's true enough, Kevin. What's changed your mind?”

“I don't understand you.”

“If you're so solicitous about him, why did you put the boycott on him?”

“Damn that for a lie!” Kevin shouted. “I wasn't even in the town when—— You watch what you're saying, he knows damn' well why.”

Flurry laid down the cast, and ticked off on his huge fingers each incident of the boycott. “Brigid, Sean, Haggerty, Brian at the store—they're all under your thumb.”

“Maybe the people here did take against Mr. Eyre. And brother.”

“So it was quite spontaneous?”

“Like the combustion,” I said nastily, “at Joyce's cottage.”

“Don't talk cod,” Kevin burst out furiously. “Everyone in Charlottestown knew about Harriet and Mr. Eyre—everyone
except you, apparently. They'd have a right to suspect he'd murdered her. I don't believe it myself, but—”

“But you don't object to anyone else believing it. Ah, come off it. What's really worrying you, Kevin? You look like a treed fox.”

And he did. There was an uncertainty about his grim, shark-like mouth, a quite uncharacteristic violence in his manner. I got the feeling that he was on the edge of panic.

“I'd like to talk to you alone, Flurry.”

“No. Dominic is staying. Two minds are better than one, if there's trouble in it.”

There was a pause. “I'm sorry for what I said just now, both of you. I
am
in trouble. You'll hardly believe it, but Superintendent Concannon has nigh acused me of—of the murder. He's been on at me again about the journey I took from Galway. As if I could remember every inch of the way and account for every minute of the night. It's a great trial, when I've so much else on my mind.”

“What else?” asked Flurry, gazing straightly at him.

“Oh, business affairs,” said Kevin impatiently and, I thought, evasively. “Maire's on at me too.”

“Is she now?”

“She thinks I—she's jealous—she had a lunatic idea I'd been—well, a bit sweet on Harriet myself. She said it straight out only the other day. Sure I don't know what way to turn.”

“And of course you'd not been consorting with my wife?”

“Don't anger me!”

A single crash of thunder made Kevin start in his chair. It was not repeated, but from now on I could hear a distant thunderstorm bumbling around in the mountains to the east. Flurry had begun tying a fly again: his fingers were amazingly nimble. Without looking up, he said,

“There's something else wrong, Kevin me boy. You may be the great panjandrum in Charlottestown, but you're not the Almighty yet. What've you been getting yourself into?”

His tone was gentle enough, almost appealing. But Kevin, though his long mouth twitched, remained stubbornly silent.

“Well then,” continued Flurry. “I'll make a guess at it. You've got yourself involved in some eejut political business, and now you're so far in, you daren't pull out: your associates would be after your blood if you tried to. You and I haven't always seen eye to eye, Kevin. But you're my brother. I wouldn't like to see you prisoned in the Curragh—or worse.”

“You fought for Ireland yourself, once,” muttered Kevin.

“And a bloody lot of good I did myself!”

“I said ‘for Ireland,' not for yourself, Flurry.”

Flurry banged his fist impatiently on the table. “So you're set to be another martyr? I don't believe it. Whatever you're in, you're in for what you can get out of it.”

“That's a lie! You've always tried to keep me down,” said Kevin, flushing. “You've always envied me because I've made good, while you sit about trading on your reputation as a veteran of the Tan War and borrowing money off me and letting your wife kick up her heels—”

“That's enough! Get out! I wash my hands of you.”

The two brothers glared at each other. Kevin jumped up and strode out of the room.

Flurry turned back to his casts, forking a fresh one out of a tin box with the three fingers of his maimed hand. “I was too hasty with him, Dominic. That fella riles me, and he always did. I have a firm intention of amendment every time; but then he's apt to throw something at me next time we meet and I lose my temper with him again!”

Gazing past his head out of the window, I saw a suddenly-drawn curtain of rain. The clouds had burst, tipping their burden on to the earth—a sheet as solid as a waterfall.

“That's great,” said Flurry. “The water'll be lovely to-morrow.”

I wandered into the drawing-room, and absently picked up one from the pile of Harriet's trashy magazines. I reflected once again on Flurry's changed personality since her death. Perhaps his former facetiousness was neither natural to him nor a mask: perhaps it was the attempt of an older man to keep up with a younger woman—to keep her amused and amenable. Had he in a way lowered himself to her own level? out of love and mental indolence? Her death had certainly shaken him out of the indolence. The new Flurry was formidable, like a huge, sleepy, grey tomcat which has rediscovered the speed of its paw.

The bow window showed rain dense as a bead-curtain, the Lissawn seething with it, the montbretia and fuchsia wilting under its onslaught. I felt a fantastic impulse to run out naked into the downpour, as if it could purify me. Instead, I went upstairs and made my bed, then took up the MSS. pages I had rescued and began reading despondently through them. No, it wouldn't do—a wooden, artificial novel. It had been better burnt when the cottage went up—destroyed, like the child Flurry believed to be his, when its mother died.

Flurry, Seamus and I had a scratch meal together—they both seemed preoccupied—and sharp at two o'clock Concannon arrived. Flurry went to let him in, and helped him out of his mac, which had been soaked just running twenty yards from his car to the front door. They came into the drawing-room.

“So you lost your nerve, Mr. Eyre,” said Concannon, gazing at me curiously.

“I wish I knew what you're talking about.”

He pulled a sheet of paper from his brief-case, and held it up by two corners before my eyes. “This. No, don't touch
it, just read it.” It was in typescript, with my signature at the bottom.

Dear Mr. Concannon,

This is to let you know I cannot face things any longer. I killed Harriet Leeson. She had been my mistress and was going to have a child by me. I feared the disgrace, and I feared Flurry would kill me when he found out. I made an assignation with her that night. I begged her to release me, but she said if I did not run away with her she would tell her husband about the baby. So I had to silence her. I had brought a knife in case I needed it. I threw it into the river after, and washed her blood off me in the river. I am sorry. I do not deserve to live. I shall go to bed to-night and poison myself. I'll be out of my misery before you get this.

Yours faithfully

Dominic Eyre

“But I never wrote that,” I said at last, utterly bewildered.

“It was written on your typewriter—I had a specimen from it a few days ago. And it's your signature, isn't it?”

“It does look like it. It's a forgery, though.”

“But you can't forge fingerprints.”

“
Fingerprints
?”

“I got the letter by this morning's post. I had it tested. It bears your fingerprints upon it—and no one else's.”

I collapsed into a chair, dumbfounded. I thought I was going to faint. Flurry made a move to look at the letter, but Concannon whipped it back into his brief-case. “This is a letter from Mr. Eyre, confessing to the murder of your wife, and saying he's going to commit suicide.”

“I'll not believe it.”

“Explain the fingerprints then, Mr. Leeson.” Flurry shook his head sadly. I felt desperate: the trap had closed at last. Concannon seemed to be waiting for me
to say something, but my throat was dry. Flurry said, “Look here. If it was all true, and Dominic funked it at the last moment, he'd have made a bolt for it by now, knowing he could not stop the letter.”

“This sheet of paper, with his signature and prints, out on his own typewriter—”

I broke in excitedly, remembering something. I told Concannon how I'd put a fresh sheet in the machine a few days ago, but not started writing anything—some interruption. And after his visit to the cottage yesterday, I'd noticed it was gone.

“You're not suggesting I stole it, I hope.”

“Don't be silly.”

“When did you last notice it in the machine?” he said humouringly.

“That same morning. Before the funeral.
Funeral!
I was out of the house an hour or more. Somebody could have come in and seen that sheet and known it would have my prints on it and typed that letter.”

“An interesting story, Mr. Eyre. It's easy to see you're an imaginative writer.”

“It's a bloody lot more sensible than your notions, Concannon,” rumbled Flurry.